The suite of works 'Some Roots Grow Upwards' and 'Metamorphosing Female' (2009-2011) were informed by my experience of pregnancy and childbirth. I began to perceive the world from the inside-out. In my practice, I more modestly limit myself to an aspect of feminism and motherhood that concerns me personally both as a mother and an artist. The darker side of my work primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind. Pregnancy and childbirth are life-altering and complex experiences for a woman. A mother experiences the strongest intensity of drives. She experiences emotions of attachment, aggression, fear, love and guilt. Her body is vulnerable, ephemeral and it becomes a site of transformations. I often use images of my body to portray such transitions of the flesh and of the mind. I feel that the body registers all emotions directly, and carries the 'marks'.

The first phase of my works talked about the enigma of conception, gestation and growth, and referred to an intensely personal notion of motherhood...one that is physically excruciating, bodily, and ambiguous regarding the status of life and death in the process of birth. While, every day the life sciences are gaining growing mastery over the mystery of gestation, what follows is fundamentally in the realm of the unknowable. It is largely incomprehensible. Embryology is indeed the most sublime topology! Julia Kristeva says, and I quote: 'Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously duel and alien space, to signify what is going on. 'It happens, but I'm not there.' 'I cannot realize it, but it goes on.'

There is simultaneity of death (here I refer to the mass of the afterbirth) and life in the birth of the child. There is also a certain degree of immortality in the experience of birth. Motherhood is complex as it generates emotions of both desirability and despicability. The latter experience is always concealed, obscured and remains unstated. Yet the marvel felt in experiencing the ephemeral through the maternal bond overrides this angst.

SOME ROOTS GROW UPWARDS III, IV

MYSTERY AND INQUIRY
RANJIT HOSKOTE
2014

In Sonia Mehra Chawla's works, the artist persona often appears as an archetypal figure mediating between the enigmas of the natural world and the experimental protocols that science devises to investigate them. Her mixed-media paintings, prints and video works assume the form of encounters between mystery and inquiry. In her 2009-2011 series, 'Some Roots Grow Upwards: The Transformative Experience of the Biological Imperative: Both Desired and Despised', for instance, the artist persona takes a nap on a couch while a dream play involving the human body, stripped to nerve, muscle and bone, unfolds around her; neural electricity links her to a ghostly X-ray double, heavy with child, and to pensive skeletons drawn from the history of anatomical representation.

Her own bodily experiences, especially of pregnancy and childbirth, provide a recurrent basis for Sonia's reflections. Incrementally, during the last decade, she has developed a vocabulary of germination and gestation, phrased in placental and foetal forms as well as protozoan and plant images. In the 2011 diptych, 'The Sea Within' and the 2013 triptych, 'Embryonic Plant', she subverts the conventional symmetries of scale and detail in a gesture reminiscent of science-fiction scenarios of miniaturization; she inserts the artist persona into a universe dominated by the gigantically enlarged forms of micro-organisms, variously honeycombed, tasselled, tangled, globular or star-shaped.

When Sonia presents us with the complex and visually exciting micro-architecture of cellular structures, of ganglia and cortices, spores, packed seed-pods and streaming plankton, she draws us into an experience of abundant and versatile aesthetic stimulation but also into a visual regime framed rigorously by the optics of microscopy, radiography and nanography. On a preliminary viewing, it may appear that the primary impulse in Sonia's practice a lyrical and expressive one, geared towards the production of tapestried images that celebrate the domain of organic forms invisible to the naked eye. Closer engagement reveals, however, that her practice is also sustained by a compelling conceptual orientation: a fascination with imaging itself, the constant translation of experience into image, as a key mode by which the human consciousness anchors itself in the world.